Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
This week’s edition of “The Defender In-Depth” featured an interview with Albert Benavides, an expert on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) who took viewers on a deep dive into what’s really going on with how vaccine-related injuries and deaths are tallied.
Benavides, founder of VAERSAware.com, analyzed numerous deficiencies in the VAERS system that he said contribute to the significant underreporting of deaths and serious adverse events.
Benavides, who has an extensive background in HMO claims auditing, data analytics, medical billing and revenue cycle management, also explained how two parallel VAERS systems operate — with only one of these systems available to the public.
The public-facing system does not contain updates made to VAERS reports after the initial reports were filed.
Benavides shared a presentation highlighting key findings he’s identified by studying VAERS data, arguing that many of these discrepancies, in his opinion, are intentional and hide the true extent of vaccine-related deaths and adverse events.
VAERS data ‘manipulated,’ legitimate reports ‘deleted’
Benavides said he’s been able to identify over 30,000 reports related to the COVID-19 vaccines which “have been deleted,” including 1,100 death reports that have been deleted.
“I really believe that a lot of them are legitimate reports and should not have been deleted for being a duplicate … nor were they fake or false reports, because they’re so professionally written and [were] submitted by a contactable physician,” Benavides said.
This is just one of the several ways in which VAERS data is “manipulated,” he said. “There’s over 100,000 severe adverse events that are technically classified as ‘not serious,” noting that the threshold for classifying an adverse event as “serious” in VAERS is itself high, with events classified below “emergency” considered not serious.
Many VAERS reports are also “throttled” — meaning there was a delay between the filing time of the report and the time the report appeared in VAERS, Benavides said.
In one example he cited, 41% of the 999 death reports filed in VAERS over a 14-week period between Nov. 18, 2022, and Feb. 17, 2023, concerned instances where “the person actually died in 2021.” Benavides said, “This is indicative of the throttling, the purposeful delay in publishing the results.”
While Benavides said a “lag time” of “four to six weeks” was “reasonable” in order to authenticate claims, he identified at least 100,000 reports where the delay exceeded 90 days, and numerous instances where the delay neared or exceeded two years.
In other instances, Benavides said, VAERS report filing dates were manipulated, with reports appearing to have been submitted much later than they actually were.
“Last week in real time, they gave us 22 deaths where the people died in 2021, and they’re just now telling us about it,” he said.
30% of COVID vaccine reports list age ‘unknown’ even if age is noted in summary
Benavides also said he identified many mismatches in VAERS reports between COVID-19 vaccine lot numbers and the vaccine manufacturer listed in the report.
This is significant, according to Benavides, because “It changes the dynamic.” Cross-checking the data and assigning the vaccine numbers to the correct vaccine helps reveal, for instance, that certain lots may be “more toxic” than the data otherwise indicates.
Benavides said he identified thousands of such reports in the VAERS data — and similarly, approximately 50,000 instances where COVID-19 vaccine reports are listed with an “unknown manufacturer,” even in cases where the vaccine manufacturer is clearly indicated in the report’s accompanying written summary.
Another major “disconnect,” according to Benavides, is reports of serious adverse events — such as cardiac arrest, stroke or even death — being listed in the written summary, but because specific boxes were not checked off, the report does not appear as a death or serious adverse event in the VAERS database.
Similarly, Benavides said that “30% of all the COVID-19 reports in VAERS have an ‘unknown age’” listed. He said his analysis showed that a disproportionate number of these “unknown age” reports pertained to children and that, in many cases, the age of the victim was documented in the report’s written summary.
“A conventional search will retrieve 200 dead kids from 0-17 years old” connected to the COVID-19 vaccines, Benavides said. His analysis, however, showed that, in fact, “there’s about 500 dead kids — the other 300 you can’t see because there’s no age.”
VAERS administrators ‘purposely stripping out data’
According to Benavides, VAERS administrators “allow these errors … to pass through,” and while some of them may be the result of a mistake or “typo,” he believes, overwhelmingly, that VAERS administrators “are purposely … stripping out data.”
Benavides said there are two VAERS databases, but “it’s only initial reports that are made public” and available via the public-facing VAERS platform. Updates that are made to reports submitted to VAERS are not visible via the public interface.
According to Benavides, these updated, non-public reports may indicate larger numbers of deaths and serious adverse events.
“They know how many people are now since dead, but they don’t tell us that’s [in] the second database,” Benavides said, adding that VAERS does not publish all reports it receives.
Benavides said that prior to 2011, all VAERS reports were public. He said that the timing of this change was not coincidental, as a 2010 Harvard study found that less than 1% of all adverse events are reported to VAERS.
“You can trust the information in VAERS. It’s just that it’s the very tip of the iceberg,” Benavides said. “They need to change the setup. They need to get rid of the management, but they’re bought out.”
Watch the latest episode of ‘The Defender In-Depth’ podcast:
